


Flight of the Valkyries

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Amputation, Gen, Loyalty, Past Violence, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-20 05:56:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16131047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “I knew the Valkyries were part of our history,” Thor said, “but I’d started to think the chosen were a myth.  Just something for the murals because the artists liked painting the wings.  But you really were one.  Are one.”Val could take a lot of hits without showing it, but that was one too many.  She winced and looked away from him.  The chilly tiles of this athletic shower were either grouted pink or growing a peculiar kind of mold.“Present tense doesn’t apply,” she said finally.  “I’m not chosen anymore.  Just scarred.  That was quite a process.  I bled and bled for days, thought I’d die from it.  I wanted to.”





	Flight of the Valkyries

It had been a few thousand years since Val had shown her scars to anyone who knew what they meant. She would have thought pickling her brain in booze for all those stacked-up centuries would have made her forgetful enough to maybe turn her bare back to Thor by accident, but for all fuck-ups had dogged her heels over the years, that particular one just didn’t happen for her. Even when she almost wanted it to.

And even when there would have been plenty of opportunities. Thor sweated out a fraction of his worries in sparring sessions with her—Loki hung around the margins of these bouts, slowly peeling a pear with a conjured-up dagger and providing color commentary—and after some early brushes with modesty, they’d gotten into the habit of toweling off around each other.

Val wasn’t going to complain about getting the occasional sideways glimpse of Asgard’s finest. He probably took it for brazenness or flirtation that she showered and changed her clothes facing him, seemingly unconcerned as she soaped up her body under the bracingly cold spray—since they couldn’t seem to fix the water heater, the official handed-down-by-a-particularly-pissy-prince decree was that they should start thinking of the cold water as invigorating. Invigorating, hell. It conserved their supplies, she would give it that much. No one wanted to stand under it longer than they had to. Thor hopped in and out even faster than she did.

“Setting an example for the rest of Asgard,” he said.

“You’re going to start to stink.”

“Well, we’ve got plenty of cologne.”

So they did. Probably some of scented lube could do in a pinch, for that matter. She didn’t know why this was the moment she chose to finally show him her back. She just obeyed the slight twig-snap the decision made inside her chest and turned fully around to shut off the water.

She heard Thor breathe in sharply.

Val turned to face him, eyebrows raised, chin up. “Yeah, your majesty?”

Part of her thought he’d pretend not to have noticed, but that was the part of her that still didn’t know him that well. “You were one of the chosen.”

“Yep. Big mistake that was on somebody’s part.”

“I knew the Valkyries were part of our history,” Thor said, “but I’d started to think the chosen were a myth. Just something for the murals because the artists liked painting the wings. But you really were one. Are one.”

Val could take a lot of hits without showing it, but that was one too many. She winced and looked away from him. The chilly tiles of this athletic shower were either grouted pink or growing a peculiar kind of mold.

“Present tense doesn’t apply,” she said finally. “I’m not chosen anymore. Just scarred. That was quite a process. I bled and bled for days, thought I’d die from it. I wanted to.”

There was a lot she could have told him about that. Yet another way the drinking had let her down: those memories were crystal clear. She could remember the exact pattern of the woodgrain on the table, the dark winding streak that had been level with her right eye when she had turned on that side to offer the surgeon her left shoulder for the first cut. The drop of sweat that had rolled down her nose but that she couldn’t wipe away because her arms were immobilized. How the wooziness and pain had finally, finally taken her and she had fainted on the table and how, when she’d woken up again, it was still happening. It was long, slow work to make an ordinary woman out of a winged Valkyrie.

Bare from the waist up on her plain kitchen table. At first she had lain face down, her breasts crushed flat, that small discomfort a distraction, but the surgeon had made her turn on her side, one arm above her head and the other stretched out horizontally, parallel to the floor. She could hold the pose. Valkyries never broke position.

For some reason she had always imagined, in her nightmares, that they would start from the top, but the surgeon had come in from below, down where the shape of the wing curved in just below her ribs to nearly meet her spine. That had finished teaching her the lesson she had thought she had already learned from Hela: you can never exactly imagine the pain.

At various points he had broken the bones in her wings to better fold them out of the way. Sometimes he had pulled out handfuls of feathers for the same reason.

Val had grown her wings when she’d first been blooded as a Valkyrie. Her enemy had fallen at her feet and there had been an enormous splitting pain across her back—the lightning-crack feeling of her body splitting to make way for something new. Her wings had been immense, their span and strength far more than was needed to support her in the air, and her feathers had been long and dark and full of hidden rainbows, glistening like spilled oil. She’d had to teach herself how to fight all over again—hell, she’d had to teach herself to _walk_ all over again, her balance completely shot. But what did that matter, when she could fly? When she had been chosen out of all the ranks as the Valkyrie who would lead her sisters into battle? A carrion crow, a raven of death, a bird of prey. And beautiful, beautiful. Raptor-deadly, her swords her talons.

All of it taken from her piece by piece.

“What was it?” Thor said softly.

Right: the here and the now. Her new king. And he really was new, almost downy in his softness and kindness, delicious as a peach and deadly as the poison in its pit.

“What do you mean, what was it?” Her voice was wrong. A croak.

“Why did they sever your wings? Was it because you left Asgard?”

She laughed, a harsh sound like the tearing of paper. “Like the wings belonged to the throne even if I didn’t? No, your majesty. I asked to have them cut off me. I didn’t deserve them any longer.” She became suddenly aware that she was having this whole conversation naked and she reached for her breeches and underthings, tugged them up even as they plastered close to her still wet body. “And I didn’t want them.”

“But you were chosen—”

“Chosen to live when all the rest of them died. I didn’t want that. I should have fallen on Helheim with my sisters. The wings are supposed to mean glory, but all they brought me was life. And I didn’t want it.”

“Maybe the glory is yet to come,” Thor said.

She hated him as much as she loved him, that he could say things like that and seem as though he meant them, that he could look at her all calm and one-eyed and still not remind her of his father. He demanded things from her just by existing. And she had no answer for his hopefulness. She turned her back to him again and said, over her shoulder, “You can touch the scars if you want.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Little bit of living history. And—” She gulped in an unsteady breath. “And I want you to.” She didn’t know why.

His hand was still cold from the water as he drew his fingers down the uneven flesh of her damaged back. Val had seen the scars in the mirror—wide and pink and silver, mottled and ugly. For a second she had the image of her wings bursting out again at the pressure of his hand, but nothing like that happened. Just as well. She didn’t know if she could have learned to walk all over again.

Best just to keep going for as long as she was on her feet. 

“You must have been something to see,” Thor said. He laid a warm towel across her shoulders. “Up in the sky, bearing down with all your fury and might. Or just flying, really.”

Val turned around and looked at him. “Yeah. I was something to see.” She lifted up the towel and rubbed it briskly through her hair.

“Whatever you rejected,” Thor said, “I’m glad we’re your choice now.”

Until they settle down somewhere, there wasn’t much point to wings anyway. No sky here, nowhere to fly and nowhere she really wanted to go. And her balance was good.

Her wings had come from blood and been taken in blood; this life was something else.

“Yeah, well. I wasn’t long on offers.”

“Even so.” His voice was irritatingly cheerful. Anyone would think he had a proper kingdom, not just ashes caught up in the wind, a drunk and a half-mad brother and a scientist-beast and a bunch of ex-gladiators all printing pamphlets in the ship’s belly. And Heimdall, she supposed. He was all right.

What could she cut out of herself that Thor would even disdain her for? Her heart, maybe. He was sentimental that way. But even then, he might have soldiered on with her, gentle with her scars and sorry only for the harm she’d done to herself. What did you do with a king like that?

She cleared her throat. “You’re still sloppy about guarding your blind side,” she said gruffly. “You need to make sure to always have someone stationed there in a fight if you can’t get used to swiveling your head around often enough. That’ll be me, I guess. There’s always a Valkyrie on the king’s right. Your brother goes on your left. There, if anybody ever attacks us in a nice, orderly fashion, everybody will know exactly where they stand. That’ll be nice.”


End file.
